The fan boys are incensed with some embargo enforcement from Lucas World for the release of a new Star Wars animated film, Clone Wars. One strain here, wherein Ain’t It Cool News had to take down an early review. Slashdot is also going on about it here; a dopey blog item from the Guardian here.

As the Guardian item shows, embargoes aren’t always understood, even by the press. I think they are fair. The studio has a film; it shows it to journalists early, on condition that the reviews not run until the day of release. There’s nothing wrong with that; the journalists are free not to agree to the embargo, and to wait until the film is released to review it*.

For smaller films, the screenings are held in empty theaters, often in the afternoon. For most major releases, though, these are often in the form of early-evening screenings, for which free tix are distributed to the public.

From the studio’s perspective, this can make for a better reviewing environment (with an audience pumped up to see a “special” early showing) and beyond that hopefully can give the film some “word of mouth” early buzz.

Since the whole point of the latter is to get people talking about the movie, the phenomenon of internet-era early reviews magnify the potential to either help or harm a particular film.

Ain’t It Cool got invited ex officio to an early Clone Wars** screening, posted a review, and then was asked by Lucas to take it down. The site did it, but didn’t like it:

Does this whole thing stink? Yep. Sorta does. They’re having public screenings of the film, like yesterday’s show at the Egyptian, and if I’d gone to one of those, no one would be able to embargo anything.

*In practice this never happens. With the increase in Thursday midnight screenings, more and more papers are reviewing major films a day early. National outlets like Time and Newsweek have always been given a pass on this, not so much because their reviews are so influential but because they can, once in a while, provide slobbery cover-story PR bonanzas for hard-hitting skeptical journalism about big-budget product like your Da Vinci Codes and Harry Potters. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone (which is a biweekly) is a reliable blurbmeister and gets a pass as well. The trades, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, generally review at the first public screening, often prior even to film festivals.

** The film, a collection of the first three episodes from an upcoming TV series, is not getting good early reviews in any case. Variety:

Leaving behind the traditional animation employed on the three-season, similarly combat-oriented “Star Wars: Clone Wars” series aired on the Cartoon Network 2003-05, Lucas & Co. here employ a computer-generated anime/manga style that results in somewhat more dramatic compositions and color schemes. But the movements, both of the characters and the compositions, look mechanical, and the mostly familiar characters have all the facial expressiveness of Easter Island statues.